As the Federal Reserve board was meeting on Tuesday to make its latest decision about interest rates—amid President Donald Trump’s continuing agitation for them to be lowered—I got on the phone with several of Fed chairman Jerome Powell’s most cogent critics.
Critics like Karen Petrou, the highly respected cofounder of the bank advisory firm Federal Financial Analytics, who has long argued that the policies of Powell and his predecessors, Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke, dramatically increased income inequality. Critics like Mohamed El-Erian, the well-known economist, former CEO of bond investing giant Pimco, and now president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, who warned before just about anyone that Powell was sowing the seeds of inflation by keeping interest rates too low early in his tenure. Critics like Christopher Leonard, whose book The Lords of Easy Money makes the case that the huge bond-buying program begun by Bernanke to get the U.S. through the financial crisis—and inexplicably continued by Powell after the crisis was long over—was little more than a gift to Wall Street that did nothing for the rest of us.
